THE English language is being slowly and stealthily destroyed. Not, as you might imagine, by the lazy, the ignorant or the ill-educated, but by the legal system worldwide.

We have been instructed that only beverages from Champagne and Burgundy may be referred to as such. I can buy "parmesan-style" cheese but real parmesan must originate from one specific region only. The thin edge of the wedge appeared last month with reports of the legal attempt in Greece to prevent anyone but those born on the island of Lesbos from calling themselves lesbians. Don't these people have anything better to clog up their courts with?

If this latest action is successful, where will it all end? Children arrested in the playground for giving another child a Chinese burn that did not originate in China? And what will become of crockery? Certainly china no more. We'll need to rename brussels sprouts, English muffins, french fries and kiwi fruit (again), Afghan hounds, frankfurts, chelsea buns, scotch and so on. The list is enormous, and don't think it stops there.

Millions of people worldwide will need to change their names. I don't think that Cuba Gooding jnr was really born in Cuba. Nor Paris Hilton in Paris. Then there are the legions of Dakotas and Indias, the Jordans, Chads, Georgias and Victorias. Let's see how smug their parents are when the lawyers come knocking.

Novels will need to be rewritten to remove characters not truly named from their place of origin.

You can excise Sydney Carton from A Tale Of Two Cities for starters. He definitely wasn't born here. Then there are the authors: Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Anatole France, Debra Adelaide, E.M. Forster and Kenneth Krakow, just to name a few. They'll all need to republish under other names.

Squads of Book Police will be commissioned to laboriously make their way through every literary work: fiction and non-fiction. Nothing will be exempt.

Teachers will no longer be able to correct schoolwork with the Nike tick and we'd better start finding new nouns to describe the other trademark property of the Nike Corporation, starting with Tigers and Woods.

It's enough to drive one to a non-specific generic alcohol drink.